Paint

What’s on my palette? January 2025

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It’s been awhile since my last palette check in! I think my last one was July 2024. Here’s my current 18-color main palette. I call this my “back to basics” palette because it is almost all absolute winners that have stood the test of time, been thoroughly playtested against others in their slot and come … Read more

Preparing the Arizona Palette

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I kind of made fun of myself in the New England Palette post for attempting to prepare “palettes of place” for places that I don’t know using third-hand research and commercial palettes as guides, but guess what? I don’t know any other way to prepare for travel. I’m going visiting near Phoenix, AZ, for the first time for Christmas, so I’m trying to figure out what colors to bring!

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Mix Your Own Buff Titanium Lookalike

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I used to have Buff Titanium but I don’t anymore. Its light tan color is useful and convenient because it’s common in nature, but I didn’t like the opaque, chalky way that it mixed. It is basically white, after all. Still, many artists like it. Jane Blundell talks about using it for sand, along with Goethite Brown Ochre. Claire Giordano uses buff titanium for desert/canyon scenes, as a base for sandstone rocks. It works really well, and while working one of her Capitol Reef scenes, I actually went so far as to put another tube of Buff Titanium in my cart… but then I challenged myself to make some light tan mixes with colors I already had, just to see if I might like them better.

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Another Earth Yellow showdown!

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My last Earth Yellow showdown is not, it turns out, the last word on earth yellows! I love earth yellow and I collect them. I’ve added a few more to the comparison. Here’s every color in the map above. I tried to put these in roughly cool-to-warm order (greenest undertone to orangest undertone). Top row: … Read more

The New England Palette

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Before I first traveled to Vancouver, I researched colors that might be particularly useful there, such as paints in the M. Graham “Pacific Northwest” kit, and the palettes of PNW artists such as Molly Hashimoto. Based on that research, I decided to add Dioxazine Violet and Perylene Green to my travel palette, and to make … Read more

Autumn Palette 2024 Revisited

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I’ve been using my autumn palette outside and in timely paintings for about a month, and I feel I have gathered enough experience to quickly review the colors and see if my expectations matched reality. Top Tier Colors I’m using these a lot: Also Good Borderline Not used as much as I expected What am … Read more